The next U.S. administration will inherit challenges on all fronts: a body politic buffeted by affordability concerns; a federal government hollowed out by mismanagement and ill-advised cuts; contrasting views on how to manage AI; and a democracy under significant stress. It will simultaneously need to address the harm done to the country by President Trump and the conditions that gave rise to him in the first place; doing so will require multiple lines of effort operating on very different time horizons. While significant planning efforts are underway, some areas have received more focused attention than others, and much of the work is proceeding independently, without an overarching mechanism for integrating it into a larger governing strategy.
We could learn from history. In 1943, two years before the end of World War II, President Roosevelt recognized the monumental challenge of moving from a wartime to peacetime posture and he organized a coordinated effort to plan for postwar reconversion, meaning the shift of the nation’s economy and workforce from war production back to civilian life. The planning model of centralized strategic coordination and decentralized substantive execution could better prepare the United States for whoever will take its helm in 2029. Like the President Roosevelt model, reconversion wouldn’t be focused on returning to the pre-Trump status quo; instead, it would envision the preparation of policies and institutions for a very different country, and world, the next administration will inherit.
Planning Only Goes So Far: A Cautionary Tale From 2021
Upon inauguration on Jan. 20, 2029, a new administration will not begin with a clean slate. It will have to play the hand left by the outgoing one. The Trump-to-Biden transition provides a reality check for what lies ahead. Without relitigating fault associated with the Afghan evacuation, which ended the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan in August 2021 and transported almost 77,000 Afghans out of the country, one aspect exemplifies the problem the new administration will face. Set aside big picture policy questions; consider the Trump administration’s neglect of the Special Immigrant Visa program meant to support those Afghans who had assisted the United States during the war. The disinterest was acknowledged by Secretary Pompeo’s own Inspector General in the summer of 2020. The report found that the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program was structurally incapable of meeting Congress’s 9‑month statutory processing requirement, with average adjudication instead stretching from 2-4 years. The report identified multiple systemic failures: chronic understaffing across every office involved in SIV review; non‑interoperable databases that made it difficult to verify applicants’ employment and identity; severe interagency bottlenecks in security vetting; inadequate reporting practices; and insufficient staffing at Embassy Kabul.
The Biden administration inherited the results of that neglect along with a backlog approaching 20,000 applicants and families (and growing). As the Deputy Homeland Security Advisor when President Biden made the decision to withdraw, I was asked to coordinate government-wide support for SIVs and vulnerable Afghans. The interagency surged in the spring of 2021, addressing the systemic failures of its predecessor and modifying business processes. We shortened the multi-year timeline to a few months. But it was still too little too late. By the time the Afghan government collapsed, only a small percentage of the SIV-eligible individuals had been evacuated. To the Biden administration’s great credit, it, along with dedicated veterans’ and civil society groups, remained focused on SIVs long after the evacuation. A concerted effort continued across government, but tellingly, it would require the entirety of the four years to address the shortcomings the Biden Administration had inherited and stay abreast of the complexities of the SIV program.
The sobering reality is that this one relatively obscure example pales in comparison to what the next administration will inherit. A damning bill of particulars suggests the breadth of problems that could require attention, an administration that has been administratively chaotic, fiscally irresponsible, geopolitically incoherent, scientifically dismissive, strategically shortsighted, and constitutionally indifferent. Only time will tell which institutional deficiencies persist, how they compound one another, what additional weaknesses remain hidden, and how severely they constrain the next administration’s ability to govern.
Those who have served careers in government or studied public policy already recognize the herculean effort it will take to address four years of Trump administration practices. An integrated advance planning effort will be essential. Nevertheless, the reality is that we will be picking up the pieces while also holding our breath, discovering problems we didn’t know existed, and hoping against hope that we aren’t also simultaneously facing hurricanes, wars, cyberattacks, pandemics, or financial shocks for which the government has been left ill-prepared.
From a Thousand Flowers to “Reconversion”
The good news is that there is no shortage of thoughtful people preparing ideas for America’s future. That is healthy. Democracy organizations, think tanks, universities, former officials and numerous other groups are developing proposals (including Just Security’s Reinvention Blueprints) addressing different pieces of the problem. The bad news is that there is relatively little coordination between or among elements whose work streams will have direct impact on one another.
History suggests a solution. During the height of World War II, the federal government was already thinking ahead about the transition from war to peace. In the fall of 1943, Roosevelt created within the Office of War Mobilization a unit specifically charged with planning for postwar adjustment, an effort Congress later formalized as the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (OWMR).
The planning effort combined centralized coordination with decentralized execution across a series of interdependent lines of effort: industrial reconversion, contract termination, surplus-property disposal, and retraining and reemployment. OWMR developed unified policy, coordinated interdependent activities and provided general supervision while specialized agencies, committees and field offices with relevant expertise performed much of the work. No line of effort could stand alone: for instance, factories could not return to civilian production without contract‑termination rules, and veterans could not be reintegrated without a functioning labor market.
The challenges confronting the next administration will of course be different, but, as in 1943, the organizational principle remains relevant. A reconversion secretariat consisting of a very senior former leader (someone with government-wide management experience at the level of a White House Chief of Staff or OMB Director) along with half-a-dozen senior counselors, would oversee small staffs working on cross-cutting issues: HR, budget, legal, legislative, etc. The Secretariat would provide centralized strategic coordination and ensure integration across lines of effort where most substantive work would be accomplished.
The organizational analogy, however, has an important limitation. OWMR operated within government, backed by presidential and statutory authority. A contemporary reconversion effort would necessarily begin outside government, without comparable legal authority or access to internal agency information. It would depend on voluntary participation, the stature of its leadership, and a shared recognition that the various planning efforts must be integrated. The secretariat would not supplant existing organizations or duplicate their substantive work. Rather, it would establish common planning assumptions, identify gaps and dependencies, reconcile competing priorities, and produce an integrated set of assessments, contingencies, and recommendations for a future transition team. Its value would lie not in commanding the participants, but in ensuring that their collective efforts add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Like Roosevelt’s wartime reconversion effort, this would be a temporary undertaking, designed to prepare for a fundamental change in governing circumstances. Its work would inform the formal presidential transition and ultimately the decisions of a new administration. The objective is not to create another permanent institution, but to ensure that the substantial planning already underway is integrated, its assumptions tested, and its products ready for use when the opportunity to govern arrives.
At least four interdependent lines of effort warrant planning attention now. A new administration has a daunting task before it:
- it will need to improve people’s lives;
- it will need to ensure that the Executive Branch is postured to deliver on that mandate;
- it will need to address and prepare for the uncertainties, benefits, and risks of AI, and;
- it will need to begin the process of addressing both the damage done to democracy by the Trump administration and the underlying conditions that played a part in bringing him to power.
These lines of effort are all critical. And they are all mutually dependent. Planning must proceed accordingly.
Line of Effort One: Improve People’s Lives with an Immediate Governing Agenda
The line of effort with the shortest political clock and the clearest connection to public expectations is whether the government is making tangible progress on the problems people experience in their daily lives: affordability, housing, health care, education and childcare, jobs and economic opportunity, energy, immigration, etc. For purposes of this exercise, assume any future administration plans, such as a “Project 2029,” produces a comprehensive policy agenda, foreign as well as domestic. What does reconversion add?
The SIV experience described earlier illustrates both the dependencies and the risks. There was SIV policy work during President Biden’s transition, and an Executive Order was issued shortly after inauguration. But we couldn’t execute in a timely manner. The lesson is simple: policy momentum cannot compensate for institutional degradation.
Reconversion won’t supplant work already underway, but will identify dependencies, gaps, and competing assumptions to ensure that planning across the four lines of effort proceeds as part of an integrated whole. It can, and must, account for the interrelationships: whether institutions charged with executing particular policies are sufficiently postured to do so; whether the government is adequately postured to address rapid developments in AI that could otherwise disrupt a policy agenda; and whether sufficient progress is being made on a long-term sequenced plan for democratic renewal that would enable continued progress on the other lines of effort.
The first line of effort, a governing policy agenda, carries disproportionate strategic importance. A future administration will have little political space to address our democratic deficit if citizens conclude that a change in government has not improved their lives. This effort, if successful, buys time and legitimacy for the other lines of effort. Conversely, governmental incapacity (line of effort two) and/or the existential need to monitor the uptake of AI (line of effort three) could undermine even sound policy. Reconversion should connect existing policy planning to an implementation test: Can the government the new administration is likely to inherit deliver what they promise; if not, what must be done before it can?
Line of Effort Two: Rebuilding a Government Capable of Governing
Whether it’s executing the plan to improve people’s lives or fulfilling governmental responsibilities, a competent Executive Branch is a prerequisite. Given the loss of personnel and expertise, a systematic assessment of institutional capacity will be necessary. A furtherance of the “boring business of good government” requires a component-by-component accounting of capabilities and shortcomings. This effort will likely be hindered by Trump administration roadblocks. But aided by work being done by the Partnership for Public Service and many thousands of public servants who have recently left government, small, senior teams should be charged with evaluating executive branch elements. This includes questions like: How well postured is FEMA for future emergencies? Can the Social Security Administration process applicants in a timely manner? Is the IRS collecting all taxes legally owed? Are DOJ and U.S. foreign aid architecture performing their necessary functions? Such functional evaluations should be performed across all Executive Branch elements to assess mission performance and minimum effective capability.
These assessments would necessarily be provisional. Without access to internal agency information, outside teams would have to rely on publicly available data, GAO and Inspector General findings, congressional oversight, and the knowledge of former officials and recently departed civil servants. The objective would be to establish a preliminary baseline of mission capabilities, personnel, expertise, information systems, and business processes; identify critical vulnerabilities; and determine what must be validated once a formal transition begins. Paired with the comprehensive policy agenda in the first line of effort, this second effort would help distinguish policies ready for immediate execution from those dependent on first rebuilding the machinery of government.
Advance work should be done on the HR front with the assistance of the cross-cutting team of the secretariat. Lists of highly qualified individuals willing to come back can be compiled. Rehired annuitant policies can be considered. And appointments should be reviewed for compliance with merit system requirements to restore appropriate civil service safeguards. With OPM having been cut by one third, an immediate imperative will be rebuilding the HR machinery.
The government will need to perform while it’s being repaired. This advance work focused on mission assurance and reconstruction could lessen the period of vulnerability stemming from Trump administration policies. It would provide an invaluable baseline for the landing teams that will engage after the Presidential election. As an example of this interdependence, a longer-term effort to update the Pendleton Act to both modernize and strengthen a merit-based civil service must be part of the fourth line of effort on democratic renewal; as Loren DeJonge Schulman and Rob Shriver wrote in Just Security in August, “Democracy works when the government works, and right now, neither is working as well as it should.”
Line of Effort Three: Governing the AI Transformation
AI deserves a separate line of effort because it does not fit comfortably within either policy formulation or governmental reconstruction. As the rate of technological change continues to outpace reasoned law and policy, experts debate whether AI will produce transformative gains in productivity and human welfare; profound economic, security and societal disruption; both; or something in between. There is little reason to believe that either certainty or consensus about the way ahead is on the horizon.
One could imagine the effects of AI overwhelming the governing agenda of the first line of effort, dramatically affecting the future organization of the Executive Branch, and/or raising fundamental questions about American democracy and the international order. It inconveniently complicates planning for the future, but the answer isn’t to assume away complexity. The range of plausible AI futures is sufficiently broad that the assumptions underlying the other lines of effort need to be tested against them. The question is how.
Those from the Intelligence Community will recognize one approach to significant uncertainty: the use of alternative futures. Develop several materially different but plausible AI futures; identify signposts that would suggest which trajectories are emerging; and trace the second- and third-order consequences of each.
Such work must be multidisciplinary and extend well beyond technologists. Teams exploring different futures might also include labor economists, sociologists, government regulators, national-security practitioners, and ethicists. Much like warning analysts in the Intelligence Community, they would identify indicators suggesting that a particular future is beginning to emerge. And then, for reconversion to earn its keep, ask the practical question: What does each future imply for the other lines of effort, and what governing capabilities should be planned for now so that the next administration can adapt as the future becomes clearer?
Line of Effort Four: Beginning the Generational Work of Democratic Renewal
The fourth line operates on an entirely different clock; as such, it could mistakenly be neglected. The “tyranny of the inbox” appropriately dictates the first three lines of effort as “Day One” issues for a new administration. But absent democratic renewal, progress on the other three risks being fleeting and leaving the country vulnerable to a future president better able to exploit its weaknesses. Democratic backsliding was occurring before Trump’s presidency, but his tenure has demonstrated that fringe factions out of step with most Americans can go mainstream under the right conditions; and the United States is not as far away from authoritarianism as we might like to believe.
Immense civic energy is already devoted to protecting democracy, but is it adequate? A 2026 count by the Yale School of Management identified at least 387 national organizations and more than 1,200 state-level groups working in the pro-democracy space. Yet deterioration continues. As we look to the future, is it reasonable to assume that hundreds of largely independent efforts will, by themselves, produce the institutional adaptation necessary to sustain American self-government over the next generation? Or do we need a concerted national effort to connect, test, amplify and learn from that work?
Over the next two years, this fourth line of effort should “get ready to get ready” to answer that question. A broad range of scholars and practitioners should map the fundamentals, including the interplay between democratic renewal at home and the international environment: identify gaps and dependencies; consider a long-term sequencing of reforms that would leave us in a better position; and propose ideas for how to get there. Could this be advanced by an independent, U.S. Institute for Peace-like institution that could maintain the long-term roadmap, evaluate experiments, convene competing perspectives, preserve institutional memory and bring senior practitioners in for limited rotations? The precise structure need not be decided now but we do need to grapple with whether the path we’re on is adequate.
Unlike the temporary reconversion effort, democratic renewal will require sustained attention across administrations and generations. Whether that work is best supported by an independent institution, a network of existing organizations, or some other arrangement remains an open question. Determining how to provide the necessary continuity, institutional memory, and independence should be part of the preparatory work under the fourth line of effort rather than a prerequisite for beginning it.
Conclusion
Whatever the precise boundaries, preparation for 2029 should encompass not just the governing agenda, but inherited governmental capacity, potentially transformative AI futures, and the longer work of democratic renewal. Drawing on existing expertise and ongoing substantive work, the planning effort could be integrated through a reconversion strategy of centralized coordination and decentralized substantive execution. The objective is both simple and practical: the next U.S. administration will want to arrive in 2029 with policies ready, governmental vulnerabilities understood, contingencies prepared, and longer-term work underway. It should not discover after inauguration that which they had two years to learn beforehand.
